Art criticism in the 18th century: Enlightenment theory

At the beginning of the 18th century, the Englishman Jonathan Richardson became the first person to develop a system of art criticism. In An Essay on the Whole Art of Criticism as It Relates to Painting and An Argument in Behalf of the Science of a Connoisseur (both 1719), he develops a practical system of critical evaluation that reminds one of Jeremy Bentham’s utilitarian calculus. Establishing a hierarchy of values from 1 to 20—“sublimity” being the peak of artistic perfection—that anyone could learn to use, he suggests that criticism is merely a matter of ratings.

In the mid-18th century, Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten created the discipline of aesthetics, giving it a place as a separate philosophical study, and in so doing, afforded new criteria for critical judgment. In his most important work, Aesthetica (1750–58), he sets forth the difference between a moral and exclusively aesthetic understanding of art, a way of thinking that can be regarded as the major difference between a traditional and modern approach to art making and art criticism. Later in the century, Immanuel Kant’s Critik der Urteilskraft (1790; “Critique of Judgment”) introduced the ideas of a disinterested judgment of taste, the purposiveness of artistic form, and the difference between the beautiful and sublime. These ideas remain influential to the present day, especially in the formalist criticism that would dominate the mid-20th century.

Parallel with these developments, art history also came into its own in the mid-18th century in the person of the German historian-critic Johann Winckelmann, who took full advantage of the new formal parameters allowed by aesthetics. Generally regarded as the first systematic art historian, he was by training an archaeologist with a deep knowledge of antiquity. In works such as Gedancken über die Nachahmung der griechischen wercke in der Mahlerey und Bildhauer-Kunst (1765; “Reflections on the Painting and Sculpture of the Greeks”) and Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums (1764; “The History of Ancient Art”), Winckelmann idealized Greek art for its “noble simplicity and quiet grandeur,” and in the process he helped bring about the rise of Neoclassicism in the arts. More important for art history and art criticism, he established a model for art-historical development based on these ancient foundations. He espoused the idea of a period style, whereby a visual idea slowly but surely unfolded in an organic sequence of artistic events, growing from a primitive seed to a sturdy plant, which flowered and then decayed. More particularly, an initial “antique” (or archaic) style matured into a sublime style, whose gains were consolidated and refined into a beautiful style, which eventually collapsed into a decadent, anticlimactic, academic style of imitation. Winckelmann thought this pattern repeated in antiquity and in modern painting. Whether or not Winckelmann forced the parallel throughout history is beside the point; his idea of a discernible formal trajectory took hold.

But, just as some critics in the 17th century sought to expose the lawless alternatives to standing artistic models, Richardson’s and Winckelmann’s enlightened efforts to put art criticism on an objective basis were opposed by another Enlightenment figure, the great French encyclopaedist, author, and witDenis Diderot. Aware of the increasingly “romantic,” unruly, informal—seemingly methodless—character of art, Diderot was concerned with its moral message (as his comments noting “the depravation of morals” in François Boucher’s painting reveal). He perceived that art seemed to have fewer and fewer clear—let alone absolute and rational—rules, which implied that it could be evaluated in a more personal, even irrational, altogether idiosyncratic way. The looser the rules, the more relative the standards by which art could be judged. He saw that the new freedom of art allowed for a new freedom of criticism. In a sense, unconventional art needed an unconventional criticism to give it a raison d’être.

Diderot reviewed Salons from 1759 to 1781. He wrote a book-length examination of the Salon of 1767, in which he not only assesses contemporary art but attempts to clarify its principles; building upon de Piles’s merging of emotion and intellect, he shows that philosophical evaluation and empirical documentation are inseparable in art criticism. The pages Diderot devotes to seven landscape paintings by Horace Vernet are particularly exemplary of his approach. Diderot describes Vernet’s landscapes with great precision, as though he were walking through them; the peripatetic response to the topical is basic to art criticism, which deals with new art whose value has not yet been clearly established. In addition to inspiring such a literal mode of interpretation, these landscapes also stimulated Diderot’s intellect and evoked a certain mood. Diderot praises Vernet because his landscapes appealed to his mind as well as his emotions—because spontaneous attunement to them led to reflection. This double demand—that the critic be responsive to the spirit of a work of art so that he is able to find the truth in it or, to put this another way, that he appreciate it in its immediacy so that he can find the meanings it mediates—has been the credentials of the critic ever since. The critic must have feelings as well as knowledge, so that, like Diderot at his best, his criticism fuses “colorful description and arresting philosophical observations,” as the American scholar Jean Eldred writes.

In the 18th century it also became apparent that, if successful, criticism just might elevate a subjective preference into a canonical art. Artists have always been threatened by destructive criticism—major 18th-century artists, such as Boucher, Quentin de la Tour, and Jean-Baptiste Greuze, did not exhibit in 1767 out of fear of it. But constructive criticism, showing how emotionally rich and intellectually meaningful his art was, could give an artist immortality. Thus, if the critic could make a convincing case for an art, on whatever “theoretical” ground, as Diderot did for Vernet, then it gained a certain significance that, however eccentric, gave it credibility, even fame, at least for a short time.

Art criticism in the 19th century

The growth of power and influence

Art criticism grew exponentially in the 19th century, when artists began to make works with an uncertain future. Rather than working for the church or state, whose commissions demanded ideological and often stylistic conformity, artists had become freelance and seemingly free-spirited producers for a market that was not always there. Of course, the state still sponsored exhibitions—the annual Salon of the French government was the model (inaugurated in 1667, when Louis XIV sponsored an exhibition of works by the members of the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture in the Salon d’Apollon in the Louvre Palace). Salon standards were bound by tradition until the mid-19th century, when they began to relax under the pressure of new theories of art, developed in response to new kinds of art, which rebelled against traditional models.

The new artistic liberty was undoubtedly influenced by the republican revolutions that broke out in 1848 against the monarchies of the Austrian Empire, France, Germany, Italy, and Sicily—that is, against the ancien régime. Every one of the revolts was repressed, but the liberal spirit that inspired them lived on in art, displaced from its original purpose. (This spirit no doubt was also encouraged by a general atmosphere of social and cultural change, evident in the Industrial Revolution and in the growth of museums and libraries that was correlative with the growth of literacy.) Before 1848, sketches could be submitted to the Salon jury, but only the finished work could be exhibited; afterward, paintings were exhibited that seemed closer to sketches than finished pictures. After 1850 the traditional standards in the category of heroic landscape were ignored—in effect suspended as obsolete—so that the naturalistic landscape paintings of Théodore Rousseau could finally be exhibited. Similarly, subjects from everyday life, composed and painted in a less-finished manner, were allowed in what had hitherto been the academically rigid category of “genre.”

Change was clearly in the air and with it liberalization—a new democratization of art, with a new abundance and diversity that had to be sorted out. Criticism began as a journalistic effort to do so, with reviews (often by literati) appearing in such belles lettres magazines as the Examiner, Athenaeum, Art Journal, Revue des deux mondes, L’Artiste, Gazette des beaux-arts, Grenzboten, Das Deutsche Kunstblatt, Die Dioskuren, and Zeitschrift für bildende Kunst. These magazines were consulted by both the bourgeois buying public and the art cognoscenti. Criticism in these journals often became a theoretical effort to justify critical choices—that is, to rationalize what was often an intuitive appreciation of certain artists. In other words, the determination of value, on whatever theoretical basis, entered into the reporting of information, often for those who had little or no chance to see the art in question, thereby legislating opinion into art history. As the French poet and art critic Paul Valéry wrote, “There is never a formless object, a colourist’s folly, a freak of distortion that cannot be imposed on public attention, even to the point of admiration, by means of description and analysis, and by taking advantage of the fact (20 times proved in the 19th century) that the reactions of opinion can raise to the rank of a masterpiece a work which on its first appearance was misunderstood or ridiculed, thus multiplying its original market value by a thousand.” As the French poet and art critic Charles Baudelaire had earlier exclaimed in his essay “The Salon of 1846”: “How many artists today owe to the critics alone their sad little fame!”

Whatever the ironies of advocacy, some critics chose to take up the cause of individual artists who embodied certain artistic preferences or principles. The cause of painter J.M.W. Turner was taken up by John Ruskin, a brilliant, eccentric, often disturbed figure, who was himself an artist. Ruskin defended Turner’s landscapes—which had been ridiculed by critics who found them too technically daring—with youthful exuberance in Modern Painters (vol. 1, 1843), on the grounds of their empirical accuracy. He would use the same defense in his support of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. The Pre-Raphaelites had received harsh criticism from critics such as the novelist Charles Dickens, who in 1850 wrote with disdain of their disregard for academic ideals in their highly realistic paintings. In 1851 Ruskin took on the role of public defender for the group, publishing a pamphlet and writing twice to The Times of London in the Pre-Raphaelites’ defense. The public was clearly aware of developments in art, as such newspaper letters indicate.

Other critics supported more a stance than a particular artist, continuing the Poussin-Rubens debate of the 17th century. The tension between the academics and the independents was epitomized in the dispute between those who supported the cool idealizing Classicism of J.-A.-D. Ingres, whom French critic Jules-Antoine Castagnary singled out as the one “great portraitist” of the 19th century, and those who supported Eugène Delacroix’s romanticism, colour, robustness, and imagination, as Baudelaire called them in admiration. Ingres, a student of Jacques-Louis David, was a master of drawing who, like Poussin, turned to Raphael as a model of harmony and construction, while Delacroix extended the Baroque concern with colour that was evident in Rubens and the Venetians. Ingres was “the last of the great French Classicist painters,” as the Austrian art historian Fritz Novotny wrote, while Delacroix inspired young innovative painters such as Paul Cézanne. At mid-century, apart from Baudelaire, who advocated the most romantic possibilities of painting, the most prominent critics tended to think in terms of stark oppositions and distinctions—often beauty and ugliness—and thus often failed to achieve an adequate dialectical criticism. Thus, for example, French critic Étienne-Jean Delécluze was a supporter of the “Homerists,” followers of Ingres’s style, and deplored the “école du laid” (“school of ugliness”) of the “Shakespeareans,” who emulated Delacroix. But this debate would become moot with the development of the avant-garde.

The avant-garde problem

Painter Gustave Courbet’s rebellious Realism was the case par excellence of new avant-gardism that threw off the centuries-old debate between Classicism and radicalism. In 1855 two of his paintings—the now famous Burial at Ornans (1849) and The Artist’s Studio (1855)—were rejected by the jury of the International Exhibition in Paris. Courbet responded by defiantly building his own exhibition space, where he displayed 43 works, declaring their style “Le Réalisme,” as though in opposition to the idealism of officially sanctioned art. His social realism was certainly evident in the rejected works, which from the government’s point of view rebelliously showed too much empathy for the people, especially because manual labourers were presented as heroic personages. In 1845 the Fourierist Gabriel-Désiré Laverdant declared that “the artist [who] is truly of the avant-garde” must be socially aware—“must know where humanity is going.” Courbet, who was a social activist, clearly seemed to know.

Yet the critics of the day were often not ready to keep up with, let alone accept, such avant-garde theories of art’s purpose, subject matter, and style. Courbet became the “critical” artist at mid-century, and the critic’s position was largely defined by his stand, pro or con, on Courbet’s revolutionary “ugliness,” or brutal Realism. The journals of Edmond and Jules Goncourt are an indispensable record of the events of the day, but the brothers omitted any mention of Courbet’s paintings in their first Salon review, because his Realism—“matter glorified”—offended them. Similarly, critic Clément de Ris refused to discuss Courbet’s hugely influential Burial at Ornans, dismissing his “pursuit of ugliness.” Castagnary and Théophile Thoré (also known by pen name William Bürger) had a more ecumenical approach, embracing many kinds of art, although Thoré, a friend of Théodore Rousseau, seemed to prefer landscape paintings, finding in them a “mystical beauty” unsullied by materialism. The alternative critic to these was Théophile Gautier, whose fluid writing style and indiscriminate enthusiasm for art made him one of the most popular critics of the day. But he, too, described Courbet as a “mannerist of ugliness.” On the other hand, critic Pierre Petroz thought that Courbet’s paintings “mark new progress toward complete sincerity in art,” and Courbet’s great defender Champfleury praised his Realism as “serious and convinced, ironic and brutal, sincere and full of poetry” and found the Burial at Ornans to be “true and simple.”

Despite the general critical disdain and controversy aroused by Courbet, other artists were inspired by his model and began to form their own alternative salons. The jury for the official Salon of 1863 rejected Édouard Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’herbe (“Luncheon on the Grass”) and two other paintings by him, along with the work of up to 4,000 other artists. To appease this discontented crowd, the government offered exhibition space in the Palais des Champs-Élysées, the so-called Salon des Refusés. Napoleon III found little difference between the rejected and selected works, but, as the American art historian Robert Rosenblum writes, the Salon des Refusés was regarded as a “counterestablishment manifestation, where artists at war with authority could be seen.” Manet, who is for many the first truly modern painter, seemed to epitomize this antiauthoritarian, counterestablishment attitude, by reason of his harsh Realism, for example, in the notorious, sexually suggestive Olympia (1863), as well as in the apparent Impressionism of such works as Chez Pére Lathuille (1879) and White Lilac in a Glass (1880). At the time of the second World’s Fair in Paris in 1867, following Courbet’s 1855 example, Manet exhibited about 50 paintings in his own pavilion, declaring in the catalog that he “only wanted to render his own impression.” But Manet also suffered from a mixed reception—even from such friends as Baudelaire, who called him “the best of a bad lot.”

Like Courbet and Manet before them, the Impressionist artists advocated radical new theories of painting, taking on the role of critical advocacy at a time when contemporary critics were often not supportive of avant-garde developments. In 1874 they organized the “Société Anonyme des artistes, peintres, sculpteurs, graveurs, etc.,” an alternative to the Salon, and in 1874 the society had its first exhibition. As Rosenblum writes, the artists involved wanted “a place where many kinds of fresh and audacious painting could be shown to the public, works made not by artists who had been voted out of the Salon establishment, but by artists who wished to turn their backs on it entirely.” Claude Monet showed five paintings, one called Impression, Sunrise (1872), which inspired French critic Louis Leroy to give the Impressionist movement its name. In a sense, Impressionism carried sketchiness to a “sensational” extreme, suggesting that the most daring artists had unconditionally surrendered to the liberal spirit of the 1848 revolutions, in effect legitimating them aesthetically. The spirit of the Société Anonyme was invigorated by the formation of the Société des Artistes Indépendants in 1884, which displayed works by such innovative artists as Georges Seurat, Paul Signac, and Odilon Redon.

Just as the work of Courbet and Manet was too radical for most critics, the art of the Impressionists also received mixed reviews. Indeed, Leroy meant the name he gave the movement as a term of contempt. But Castagnary realized that Impressionism extended Courbet’s Realism into new territory; he recognized that the lack of finish on Impressionist paintings had to do with the attempt to render the “sensation” produced by a landscape rather than the landscape, thus pinpointing what has come to be understood as one of the basic concerns of Modernist painting.

The Post-Impressionist painters Paul Gauguin and Vincent van Gogh—who built upon the colour and brushstroke developments of the Impressionists—had better critical luck, largely in the person of the great French critic Albert Aurier. He wrote the first article ever on van Gogh (1890)—a very positive and perceptive interpretation. In a still telling, definitive essay on Gauguin (1891), Aurier supported the artist’s Symbolism, primitivism, and “emotivity.” In a similar appreciative spirit, the French critic André Fontainas praised Gauguin for “his complete sincerity,” “surging emotions,” and the very modern “violent oppositions” of his colours. In an 1895 letter to Gauguin, the Swedish writer August Strindberg called him a “savage, who hates a whimpering civilization,” and wants to “create a new world”: Gauguin used the letter as the preface in an exhibition catalog. All of this suggests that critics, at last, were not only receptive to avant-garde art but eager to embrace it for its authenticity. In “Essay on a New Method of Criticism” (1890–93), Aurier decreed that viewers must become “mystics” of the new art, for it was the “last plank of salvation.” Thus, the religion of avant-garde art was born. It remains influential to the present day—in a radical twist, it would soon become sacrilege for a critic to criticize avant-garde art, just as it was once sacrilege for avant-garde artists to criticize tradition with their art.